Imagine a pioneering tech company, “AyEye”, that has developed a groundbreaking generative AI model designed to transform digital marketing. This AI can generate tailored content, analyse trends, and deliver personalised messaging at scale. AyEye is set to redefine how businesses engage with their audiences—but like any generative AI, the model brings a host of unique risks, from copyright infringement to inadvertent bias. It’s a securing AI problem.
AyEye’s leadership recognises these risks and decides to take a proactive approach. They deploy red teaming, an intensive process to test and probe the model for vulnerabilities, and they layer the process with legal privilege to protect sensitive findings. Here’s how AyEye navigates these challenges, setting a new standard for responsible AI governance.
What is red teaming? Challenging AyEye’s AI to break its own rules
Red teaming at AyEye isn’t just an exercise; it’s a high-stakes effort to uncover hidden weaknesses.
AyEye assembles a team of technical experts, legal advisors, and external specialists to test the AI model rigorously under challenging conditions. The goal? To simulate real-world adversarial scenarios.
- Can the AI model be tricked into generating copyrighted material?
- Will it produce biased or offensive outputs?
- And could it unknowingly violate privacy regulations?
To answer these questions, AyEye’s red team designs structured input scenarios that stretch the AI’s capabilities. They test the AI’s responses to prompts likely to arise in client environments, discovering where its safety filters might falter. In one test, the red team successfully prompts the model to generate content resembling copyrighted material—exposing a liability that needs immediate attention.
For AyEye, these insights are invaluable, revealing areas where additional safeguards are required. This isn’t just about catching flaws; it’s about ensuring that AyEye’s AI can be deployed ethically and in a way its stakeholders can trust.
Legal privilege: Shielding AyEye’s most sensitive insights
Red teaming uncovers critical vulnerabilities, but this knowledge could also pose a liability if made public. AyEye realises that without legal privilege, their findings could be used against them in future litigation, creating “knowledge liability”. By involving legal counsel from the start and framing red teaming as a legally privileged exercise, AyEye ensures that these insights remain confidential.
Privilege allows AyEye to shield sensitive findings from disclosure, as counsel actively guides the process, sets compliance-focused objectives, and assesses each vulnerability’s legal implications.
Because privilege applies only when the primary purpose is legal, AyEye’s legal team carefully documents that the red teaming exercise aims to identify and manage regulatory risks such as copyright and data privacy concerns.
For generative AI, a tailored approach: AyEye’s case
Generative AI presents distinct challenges.
For AyEye, this means the red team must design tailored tests that probe the model’s generative capabilities. They aim to uncover risks specific to AI models that can produce new content, exploring what kinds of outputs the model generates under unusual prompts or scenarios.
In one scenario, the red team tests for unintended bias. They explore how the AI responds to prompts across different demographics and are surprised when the model occasionally generates responses that reinforce stereotypes. This potential bias poses both reputational and legal risks. The legal team steps in to draft remediation strategies, protecting AyEye from possible regulatory scrutiny under anti-discrimination laws.
By uncovering these issues early, AyEye’s team can address them, ensuring their AI model is robust, safe, and ready for market. This targeted red teaming approach is essential for any generative AI model, where creative freedom is as much a strength as a potential risk.
Protecting privilege: Best practices from AyEye
To safeguard confidentiality, AyEye follows a set of best practices designed to protect privilege and secure findings:
- Engage legal counsel from day one: From the outset, AyEye’s legal team takes an active role, focusing the red teaming on assessing compliance risks. This distinction is crucial to maintaining privilege, as it ensures the red teaming is legally focused rather than performance-oriented.
- Separate business and legal testing: AyEye establishes two tracks of testing. One team evaluates general model performance, while the legal team oversees a separate track dedicated to compliance and liability concerns, such as copyright, data privacy, and bias. This separation reinforces privilege and provides clarity on the purpose of each track.
- Limit disclosure and document with care: AyEye ensures that all red teaming documentation has a clear legal purpose, linking findings directly to regulatory implications. If external disclosures are needed, they are kept high-level to minimise risk, and internal access is restricted to key personnel.
- Bring in outside experts thoughtfully: AyEye hires external specialists through their legal counsel, specifying that the project’s primary purpose is to support legal guidance. Courts are more likely to uphold privilege when third-party experts are retained through counsel for legal compliance.
Workflow
| Step | Action | Details |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Define objectives and engage legal counsel | Set goals and initiate legal oversight. | Outline red teaming goals focused on compliance risks and engage legal counsel to establish privilege. |
| 2. Assemble red team and assign roles | Form a team of experts and clarify responsibilities. | Include internal experts, legal advisors, and external specialists (if needed); separate legal and business roles. |
| 3. Design red teaming scenarios and test cases | Develop specific test cases to simulate adversarial scenarios. | Create scenarios targeting model vulnerabilities, such as prompt manipulation, bias testing, and compliance checks. |
| 4. Execute red teaming exercises | Conduct tests to evaluate AI resilience and identify risks. | Push the AI with structured inputs; document findings like unintended biases or compliance risks. |
| 5. Document findings under legal privilege | Protect sensitive information with privilege designation. | Label findings as privileged and link vulnerabilities to potential legal implications. |
| 6. Implement mitigation strategies | Develop and apply solutions for identified issues. | Prioritise fixes, such as improving filters or adjusting training data, focusing on compliance risks. |
| 7. Limit disclosure and control access | Manage internal and external information sharing. | Restrict access to findings to essential personnel and maintain high-level summaries for external disclosures. |
| 8. Continuous monitoring and follow-up testing | Plan for ongoing assessment of mitigations and risk adaptations. | Schedule follow-up tests to ensure mitigations are effective and adapt AI to new risks. |
| 9. Evaluate privilege compliance and maintain records | Review privilege handling and secure documentation. | Regularly check that privileged documents are secure and not inadvertently disclosed. |
| 10. Prepare for regulatory reporting (if required) | Work with counsel to create high-level summaries for regulators, if needed. | Minimise privilege risk by disclosing only necessary high-level information. |
Securing AI with ITLawCo
The AyEye case illustrates that building secure, trustworthy AI is about more than just technical safeguards; it’s about integrating legal and safety considerations from the start. At ITLawCo, we help companies like AyEye establish privileged red teaming processes, guiding them through regulatory complexities and providing frameworks for responsible AI governance.
Our approach turns red teaming into a strategic asset, uncovering vulnerabilities while maintaining confidentiality. With ITLawCo, red teaming becomes a tool not just for security but for trust and accountability. By partnering with us, you can innovate with confidence, knowing your AI systems are resilient, responsible, and legally protected.
Let’s make AI security your advantage and redefine trustworthy AI governance—together. Contact us today.
